A Taste of Puglia with Rosetta Costantino

Join Chef Rosetta for a culinary journey to Puglia—the sun-drenched heel of Italy—where we’ll explore some of her favorite traditional dishes from this beautiful southern region.

In this hands-on class, you’ll learn how to shape orecchiette, Puglia’s signature pasta, which we’ll pair with a pesto made with fresh fava beans. We’ll fire up the grill to make Bombette—irresistible little pork rolls filled with gooey, melted cheese that burst with flavor. Then, we’ll prepare pitta Salentina, a specialty from the Salento area, and Taralli Pugliesi, a delectable traditional bread snack. To finish, we’ll indulge in a sweet treat from Lecce: Pasticciotto Leccese, a flaky pastry shell filled with rich pastry cream.

• Taralli Pugliesi (Traditional bread snack of Puglia)
• Orecchiette con pesto di fave (Handmade traditional fresh pasta tossed with fresh fava bean pesto)
• Bombette Pugliesi (Grilled pork rolls stuffed with cheese and parsley, garlic)
• Pitta Salentina (Potato pie stuffed with onions, tomatoes, anchovies, capers and olives)
• Pasticciotto (Short pastry tart filled with pastry cream)

Instructor Bio

Cookbook author and teacher ROSETTA COSTANTINO was born and raised in Verbicaro, a small wine-producing hill town in Calabria, at the southern tip of the Italian peninsula. The family moved to the Bay Area when Rosetta was 14 years old, and though they settled into the fast pace of life there, they kept their traditions. They continued to grow their own produce, raise rabbits, make their own ricotta, and cure their own salsiccia Calabrese with spicy peperoncino from their garden. Even after she earned a chemical-engineering degree at the University of California Berkeley and went on to a successful career in Silicon Valley, Rosetta retained her love of her family’s traditional foodways. Rosetta shares her story, family traditions, and over 150 recipes in MY CALABRIA: Rustic Family Cooking from Italy’s Undiscovered South (November 2010). Written with San Francisco Chronicle food columnist and author Janet Fletcher ,and nominated for an IACP cookbook award, MY CALABRIA transports readers to this unique food culture of rustic, homegrown, and homemade foods. Rosetta’s second book focusing on the desserts of Southern Italy was published by Ten Speed Press on October 2013 and has also been nominated for an IACP cookbook award.